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“I can pick up a medium-sized ducklike a pintail and it’ll be like a minute.A mallard will be maybe two minutesbecause he’s bigger and he’s got a lotmore feathers.”The Duck Picker will even reach themajority of what is the bane of anyonetrying to clean a bird, the pin feathers— the small, partly grown feathersthat are sometimes nearly subcutane-ous and are difficult to remove in mostcircumstances. “It won’t pull them allout, but will get a lot of them — prob-ably about 60%,” Coco said.

Picking the feathers off a duck
doesn’t provide much load to the
engine. “It’s about a 3.0 hp engine
and it runs at a fast idle, maybe 1700
rpm,” Coco said. “That’s about the
same as an electric motor would run.

“We also make a model with an
electric motor that has a shroud,

The Go-Devil Duck Picker uses a Briggs & Stratton 550 Series single-cylinder gasoline
engine to spin a picker head equipped with rubber fingers. In operation, the friction of the
fingers enables them to quickly pull the feathers off while leaving the skin and flesh of the
duck intact. Warren Coco, president of Go-Devil, said he has cleaned the feathers off a
smaller duck in as little as 13 seconds.

and you can attach a shop vac to
it. It sucks all the feathers into the
shop vac, which really makes it nice
because you don’t have feathers
going everywhere.

“Most of what we sell is the ones
with the engines because it’s portable.”
For all of his success with the Duck
Picker, Coco said it’s just a sideline
to his main business, which consists
primarily of selling engines and drive
systems for the mud boats used on
the rivers, lakes and swamplands of
the southern U.S.

“The bulk of my business is large
engines,” Coco said. “The 35 hp
Vanguard is my number one seller.

“I started buying Vanguard engines
back in 1988 when they came out
with a 15 hp. I remember when they
first came out, everybody was scared
to death of them because it wasn’t
something Briggs normally built.

“But when I ran it and used it, the
quality of my product quadrupled. It
turned out to be the best thing that
ever happened to me.” dp